“How do you break into consulting?”
Honestly, I wasn’t very strategic about it. You can probably do better than me.
I worked in tech marketing for 5.5 years. The cool thing about working in marketing is that it requires that you be “putting stuff out there” – publishing content, distributing it on forums and so on. During that time, I developed a little bit of a reputation for myself as being someone who put in the effort to make good content.
Looking back, if I could do it over again, I would’ve spent more time and energy actively seeking out other people. (See: “Always Be Peopling” in my directives post.) As Derek Sivers wrote, the next great opportunity you receive is going to come from someone you know. So get out there and know people. I wish I spent more time getting out there, knowing people. Most of my knowing seemed to be the result of coincidence and happenstance. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Anyway – I do get a steady stream of job offers from time to time, usually from people looking to hire me full-time. When I was working, I used to politely turn down these offers outright, because I was happy with my job. On retrospect that was quite a silly thing to do – I should have met those people anyway, because even though I intended to stay where I was, I could’ve at least heard them out, and gotten some perspective and context on what they wanted. And maybe I might want to work with them in the future! Life is long, and relationships are valuable.
Eventually, about a year after I left my job, I got a particularly enticing call from the person who would become my first major client – he recognized me from the days when we were both content marketers, and he was now the founder/CEO of his own B2B SaaS company – would I like to work with him? I would! But I told him quite honestly that I was wary of getting into another full-time job. To which he responded, “Sure, let’s figure out an arrangement that works for both of us.” And we did! And that became my first serious consulting gig.
The first gig is always the hardest, and I was lucky to be working on mine with someone whom I had common values with, common perspective, mutual respect and so on. We both wanted to make sure that the other person was getting a great deal, and we both cared about the long-term more than the short-term.
The process of figuring out my first consulting gig revealed a bunch of things to me. It was interesting to pay attention to the difference in my relationship between my previous manager and bosses, and my new boss – my client. It’s a totally different relationship. It’s more of a relationship between equals. There are a few nuanced things about this.
The interesting thing about the client-consultant relationship is… I think there’s an expectation (to me, at least) on the consultant to be “the more professional one”. Because you aren’t an employee, a CEO will be able to confide more to you than she would otherwise. She’ll be able to share her uncertainties, nervousness, confusion, etc to a greater degree than she would if you were her employee. This is fascinating, interesting information. She will also expect you to deliver to a greater degree than if you were just another employee. This is both exciting and a little scary.
After that first good gig, I’ve had a couple of smaller gigs that were satisfying – short brainstorm sessions with people who know me through Twitter. One was literally just a one-off brainstorm, and that client was very well-prepared with very clear expectations about what he wanted. That was super easy for me to work with.
A client after that was a little less precise about what exactly he wanted, but that was totally fine too – it was a slightly different conversation, but basically I always work backwards from the idea of: at the end of this conversation, I want to make sure that you have something that you can take away with you, and actually use.
After I had a couple of those, I started tweeting more about my consulting experience:
and I believe I got a couple of more clients through that! And this is where I am right now, with a handful of clients who mostly know me through Twitter, word-of-mouth, and old friendships and relationships from my full-time marketing days.